Here’s a repair! I guess someone felt that a shim was needed under the board. I’m not even sure what the fix was supposed to be fixing. From this view, outside, I couldn’t see what I was looking at. Removing the board, I found a spruce shim of sorts.

I still don’t know what the mess on the edges was or was supposed to look like, but it sort of resembled a strip of purfling made with black layers of unbelievably filthy glue on either side of the spruce core. It’s all gone now!

Fun with lasers! PDFs linked to here show information extracted from a movie of the top and back of a Brothers Amati violin. The black lines on the still photos in the PDF are curtate cycloid curves generated with free CCycloid software, based on a very simple concept of best fit with the scans. Below is the original movie from which the PDFs were derived.

Cremonese edgework starts from edge thickness. Almost invariably, the thickness of the unworn edge on a Cremonese violin (in the upper and lower bouts, not the corners and c-bouts, which run by different rules) is equal to or slightly less than the distance from the edge to the purfling. This leads to the easy conclusion that the two are somehow related, and the cause seems clear: they were both set with the same tool. A single-bladed purfling cutter, such as the still-extant one of Stradivari, can do double duty: not only can it be used to cut the purfling groove; it also can serve to cut in from the side of a plate, to establish the finished edge thickness. I often do this instead of using my drill press, and of all the hand tool methods of finishing the edge thickness, it is by far the fastest and easiest. (This method of working establishes a band of square cross-section edge outside the purfling, which begs to be rounded into a perfectly circular edge, but that’s not part of this discussion.)

Things have been busy in the shop. I’ve got some help now, someone who does really fine bow work, whom I worked with 25 years ago—James Min—is doing our bow rehairs and repairs two days a week.

When you follow this link, you’ll see why I don’t show the photo at its full size in this post: it’s the whole workshop, from one corner to the other, about 300 degrees of panoramic view of a wide-angle view of my shop. Open and pan the link for the whole effect!

I’m going to start being better about keeping these posts up now—there’s a lot going on here to show!

For those of you who are into photography stuff, in the last year I’ve added large format (5×7 and 8×10 film) formal portraiture to my project of photographically following the violin business. I’m keeping that on a separate Flickr page from my 35mm stuff.

I probably should have mentioned when I mentioned my photos of the Upper Peninsula in the 1970s a few posts ago that I have a whole set devoted to portraits of people in the violin business, such as the shot above of Will Whedbee working in his shop, and also some other violin photos, in my Flickr photostream.

I’ve been trying to add to the violin people shots on a regular basis recently, so this set will be growing. Additionally, I’ve been shooting more formal studio portraits on large format film (5×7 and 8×10) and many of these are of my friends in the violin making, playing, and dealing fields. The large format work is on a different Flickr page.

I have been writing a violin making book for a few years. Progress is slow, but I’m in no hurry. At this point I have a few easy chapters, not yet illustrated (the pictures will be half of the project, I’m sure). You can see what’s already completed to that point on the book’s own site.

Before I was involved with violins, I was a photographer. My last full-time photo job was in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, on a very small newspaper in an isolated and underpopulated area. It was a great job where I got to wander around in a four-county region asking people I saw doing interesting things to let me take their picture for the paper. My editor happened to hate both sports and check-passing/handshake photos, so I didn’t have to deal with that kind of stuff. He wanted general-interest pictures of normal people, and I was delighted to do that.

Anyway, recently I’ve been going through my old negatives, looking to see what I might have missed the first time around, and am finding all sorts of interesting pictures from that era. I decided to digitize some of them, and put them up on Flickr in their own set. These aren’t necessarily newspaper photos–mostly they’re pix of friends and family from that period, doing their daily things. That’s me in the garden at the top of this post, for instance (Annie shot that one).

I expect to be putting things up on a sort of an irregular basis. Check it out if you’d like, on Flickr.

Finding Us

Visitors are welcome at the shop by appointment during regular business hours, 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Monday through Friday.

Learn Violin Making at the SCVMW

Every June, I teach violin making and setup at the Southern California Violin Making Workshop in Claremont, organized by Jim Brown of J Brown Violin Maker. All skill levels are welcome and participants can sign up for one or both of the week-long sessions. In addition, master bow makers Lynn Hannings and George Rubino alternate summers teaching bow making.

Jim does a wonderful job of organizing, hosting, and fostering a congenial atmosphere. Participants come from all over the US and several other countries. The SCVMW is a fantastic experience and always a high point of my year.